Documented fire history undercounts actual fires due to evidence decay.
Evidence
Thus, my fire year maps are a conservative estimate of the actual fire history. As each succeeding fire sweeps the landscape, former st’ands or scar-bearing trees are further obliterated. After about 400 yr all the tree ring evidence is gone. Finally in addition to the large burns, there certainly were hundreds of creeping surface fires that scarred few trees, if any. All traces of such fires are already gone-even fires of the 20th century. — Miron L. Heinselman, Fire in the Virgin Forests of the…, 103
Categorization
- DEFINE: The reconstructed fire record is a lower bound: successive fires erase prior scars and stands, and surface fires leave no trace within a generation.
- XREF: connects to: Virtually every BWCA forest stand regenerated after fire since 1595 — Miron L. Heinselman, Fire in the Virgin Forests of the…, 2; Virtually every BWCA virgin forest stand burned since 1595. — Miron L. Heinselman, Fire in the Virgin Forests of the…, 121
Related
- Virtually every BWCA virgin forest stand burned since 1595. (similarity 0.88)
- Virtually every BWCA forest stand regenerated after fire since 1595 (similarity 0.86)
- Five fire years created nearly three-quarters of today’s forest stands. (similarity 0.85)
- Surface fires returned every 36 years on average in surviving pine stands. (similarity 0.83)
- The landscape mosaic remains fire-created even after sixty years of suppression. (similarity 0.81)
- Contrasting stand ages let fire boundaries be traced on airphoto maps. (similarity 0.81)
- The BWCA still has a roughly 60-year window before fire exclusion makes restoration impossible. (similarity 0.80)
- Coring dominant fire-adapted trees dates stand origin after burns. (similarity 0.79)